CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-77203

HighCVSS 8.8
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.33%

23th percentile - higher than 23% of all known CVEs

Summary

The Groups – Memberships and Access Control plugin for WordPress in versions up to and including 4.6.0 is vulnerable to privilege escalation. The groups_join() function derives group-join eligibility from the ambient post's author capabilities via the global $post->post_author rather than the authenticated user's own capabilities, while also minting a valid groups-join-data hash and nonce. An authenticated attacker with Subscriber-level access can enroll into any group, including privileged ones, and ultimately escalate to Administrator.

Risk Assessment

Any logged-in user, even with low privileges, can gain full administrative control over the WordPress site. The risk is critical as it leads to complete site takeover.

Recommendation

Update the plugin to a version later than 4.6.0 as soon as it is available, or temporarily disable it. Check for unauthorized administrator accounts and review group memberships.

Related vulnerabilities

Original NVD description (English source)

The Groups – Memberships and Access Control plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege Escalation in all versions up to, and including, 4.6.0. This is due to the groups_join() function deriving group-join eligibility from the ambient post's author capabilities via the global $post->post_author rather than from the currently authenticated user's own capabilities, while simultaneously minting and returning a valid groups-join-data hash and WordPress nonce for the caller in the same response — eliminating all authorization barriers to self-enrollment. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Subscriber-level access and above, to enroll themselves into any group including privileged groups carrying the groups_admin_groups capability, and to subsequently create and join a group containing every registered WordPress capability, effectively escalating their privileges to Administrator. Exploitation requires the attacker to supply an Administrator-authored post ID via the post_ID parameter of the authenticated wp_ajax_parse_media_shortcode handler in order to establish the privileged ambient post context used by the flawed authorization check.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS